ATLAS Stage 2: Journey mapping
ATLAS is the learning management system for PebblePad. It's a complex piece of software that has evolved and grown over a number of years. As a consequence, its hard to master and UX research revealed that many users find it "intimidating" and will make a point of trying to avoid its use. A more robust, comprehensive on-boarding process was identified as a means to reverse this trend and get more users confident in using ATLAS and turn them into competent, knowledgable intermediates.
The objective for this journey mapping exercise was to document the 'as is' on-boarding process for the key primary persona 'Angela the Academic', capturing all the steps that are currently in place including the people and workflows involved. It was critical that we understood the current on-boarding journey so we could identify where new users were struggling with the complexity of the software and the process and where there were opportunities to simplify core functionality, introduce new systems of support and improve documentation. We also needed to identify how we were going to measure the impact for any proposed improvements to the on-boarding process.
The goal was to complete the journey maps for academic on-boarding in 2 weeks. This was to include an introduction presentation to journey mapping for anyone not familiar with the methodology, a number of workshops featuring cross-functional teams of academics, product managers, UX designers, architects, developers, customer success managers and support staff. The production of the finished maps was also planned into the project along with a presentation to key stakeholders and the wider organisation. Finally, a plan was to be implemented to roll-out solutions for improving the journey whilst simultaneously introducing impact metrics to ensure we understood what worked well and what needed further refinement.
This journey mapping exercise proved to be one of the best I have ever run. The original time-scale for the project was deliberately challenging and this meant that the exercise had to be planned with a certain amount of precision. Thankfully a number of team members had some experience in journey mapping so I was able to leverage this which was a big help. Up-skilling those team members that had little or no experience of journey mapping was fairly straight forward as I have had a lot of experience in rolling out this methodology in other organisations at a much bigger scale. With my training presentations already to go, the key challenge was getting the team together both for the introduction and the subsequent workshops. Thankfully, with support from the C-suite and an enthusiastic team this challenge wasn't a big issue.
The workshops to generate the maps have always run really well, and this project was no different. Its a fun, engaging exercise that is a great vehicle for breaking down existing work silos. During the course of 3 workshops we were able to put together three 'acts' representing the full end-to end journey. Having cross-functional representation in the workshops is critical in being able to document all aspects of the journey and deep dive into the details for each stage on the behaviour time-line.
Three 'acts' were defined and three 'moments that matter' were identified. The on-stage and back-stage experience was captured and the emotional experience for the persona was mapped out. Once this mapping process was completed we were able to generate 36 new ideas for how to improve the on-boarding journey. All these ideas were either added to the product roadmap or the product backlog for further investigation and development. 14 impact metrics were also defined and implemented with the assistance of a senior system architect. The following metrics are now being monitored and reported:
- Average time to create a new 'workbook'
- NPS
- Reduction in support time/tickets
- Activation rates into 'creation'
- Device usage
- Number of completed set-ups
- Number of active 'workbooks'
- Number of activated workspace managers
- Number of dummy accounts
- % of submissions opened that report new activity
- % clear rate for submissions with new activity
- Average time with a submission
- Reported C-SAT scores
- Number of inactive responses from students
It is anticipated that core usage of ATLAS will be significantly increased as a result of this exercise and the implementation of the ideas generated through it.
